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animal agriculture
What I’ve Learned from Chickens
There’s both good and sad to report from our years of living with hens. But we’re still at it and still learning.
What Motivates a Chicken?
One of the biggest payoffs of our hen hobby is the experience of living with alien creatures. Chickens aren’t much like dogs or cats. Birds have brains that are organized differently from mammalian brains, and birds see colors we can’t register. Chickens communicate vocally with about 25 different calls, screams, whines, cackles, purrs, and clucks. Janet and I spend a lot of time trying to understand what our hens are thinking and feeling, and we’ve learned a little about what motivates them.
Food is certainly at or near the top of the list. Chickens display extraordinary enthusiasm for food and are vigorously competitive whenever any treat is on offer. Their motto: Eat fast and ask questions later.
Reproduction sometimes takes top priority in the hen brain. We don’t keep roosters, since we live within city limits and an ordinance forbids them. Nevertheless, we have outlaw neighbors with roosters, and we are reminded daily that the male of the Gallus gallus domesticus species can indeed make a lot of noise. Roosters are required for fertile eggs, but in the absence of males, hens lay anyway. Some of our hens go broody occasionally, spending a couple of weeks sitting in their nest trying to incubate eggs that aren’t there, because we’ve collected them and put them in our refrigerator. Broody hens need special care, as they tend not to eat enough to keep themselves healthy. The hens often squat for us, as they would for a rooster wishing to copulate; when they do, we give them a backrub to partially fulfill their instinctive need—and to take advantage of a receptive moment when we can pet them or pick them up.
In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives.
Curiosity may be proverbially associated with cats, but we’ve found that chickens are perpetually inquisitive. They spend a large portion of each day exploring every corner of our yard, scratching in the dirt and digging holes. What’s down there? Who knows what might turn up?
Cleanliness requires effort. Sometimes chickens and other birds roll around in the dust as a way of discouraging mites and other pests (spa day!); afterward they shake their feathers in satisfaction. Feather maintenance is always a priority, and time must be devoted daily to preening. The versatile and sensitive beak must be cleaned occasionally by carefully wiping it on a hard surface (or our pants). Chickens and humans have very different ideas about cleanliness, but hens do care about it in their own way.
Affection might not be the strongest chicken motivator, but it certainly deserves to be listed. At first, we thought our chickens’ seeming enjoyment of human cuddles was merely a clever way of begging for more food treats. But long-term observation has shown us that some hens are just as affectionate as any dog or cat, and that food is not a strategic goal of cuddles. One of our hens, Lulu (more about her below) demands at least one cuddling session every day, and will sit in your lap for half an hour or more, soaking up love and offering all the hugs she can give, considering that she has wings rather than arms. Silvie is a cuddler too, but less demanding in that regard than Lulu. The hens’ affection for one another is a little more complicated, as we’re about to see.
Stella: avian elegance, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)
The Politics of Hens
Chickens are highly social creatures and instinctively establish a pecking order: One hen occasionally pecks others on the back of the head (often when everyone is eating) to show her dominance.
Lulu is at the top of the social ladder, and she’s a big, loud, confident hen. Friends have asked us whether chickens have individual personalities; the best answer is an introduction to Lulu. She is bossy around the other hens and demanding toward us. If she wants treats or cuddles, she lets us know by screaming—sometimes for minutes at a time—and, unfortunately, she’s as loud as any rooster. Being the top hen comes with perks, but duties as well. It’s up to Lulu to keep social order, watch for danger, and manage relations with the humans.
Stella and Sparrow—of rare designer breeds, while Lulu and Silvie are Orpingtons—are smaller, lower in the order, and relatively quieter and more skittish. Whenever Lulu is close by, they must be wary of a peck. But they’re not constantly bullied and seem to be happy, well-adjusted hens. They know the order and get their needs met within it. Sparrow is a cute comedian, always evoking chuckles from us humans. Stella is a self-reliant, industrious, elegant loner; she’s the smallest of our hens and has a scratchy voice but lays big pastel green eggs.
Some of our clearest insights into chicken social behavior come at dusk, as the hens enter their house and choose a spot on the perch. Who gets to sleep where, and next to whom? The lineup is different every night, and each night there are several tense minutes of jockeying. Sparrow seems to love snuggling up against big, fluffy Lulu, despite the prospect of a peck. Stella likes ascending the henhouse ladder last, and, though low in the hierarchy, usually gets her choice of sleeping spot. Always-agreeable Silvie (our vet called her “a very personable chicken”) just takes whatever space is available.
The whole gang: Stella, Lulu (front, naturally), Silvie, and Sparrow, on April 22, 2025. (Photo: Janet Barocco)
Generous Teachers
I’ve been astounded to learn the degree to which chicken evolution has been hijacked by humans. Genes matter, and for thousands of years people have been wittingly or unwittingly selecting chickens for humanly desirable traits.
Often, chickens pay a price. Humans want eggs; so, they breed hens that lay up to 300 of them a year—an astonishing feat. Laying an egg is no small matter. It literally takes a lot out of you. While wild relatives of the domestic chicken can live 20 years, most commercial hens live short lives, often (when they’re not killed for meat) perishing after 2 to 5 years. And while they’re pumping out those eggs, they can easily suffer from nutritional deficiencies and bone problems.
People have also bred chickens for size, feather and egg color, and behavior (I’ll refrain from discussing the commercial chicken meat industry, which has its own breeding priorities). Indeed, breeding has created more extreme varieties of chicken than of any other animal species except Canis lupus familiaris (dog). All our most affectionate hens have been Orpingtons of one sort or another: no accident, as most Orpingtons tend to be friendly.
Is it right for one species to interfere so much with the evolution of another? Not many humans seem interested in entertaining the question. One could conclude that chickens have benefitted from their relationship with people: Gallus gallus is by far the most numerous bird species (there are nearly 30 billion of them). So, humans have contributed to chickens’ evolutionary success. But that success depends entirely on chickens’ continued utility to a capricious ape whose overall activities are wrecking the biosphere. My advice: If you love feathered creatures, keeping chickens can teach you a lot about them, but you’ll do far more for this broad class of animals by creating or restoring habitat for wild birds.
In 14 years, we have gotten to know 10 hens and can recall each one (Janet has painted individual portraits of most of them). We’ve witnessed sad deaths, but also beautiful lives. Chickens are smart, emotional animals. They can decimate local insect populations, but they are resilient and courageous. They deserve our respect.
Oh, did I mention the poop? There’s lots of it. Everywhere. Every day. It’s good for the compost pile and the garden.
Recommended reading:
Andrew Lawler, Why the Chicken Crossed the World
Sy Montgomery, What the Chicken Knows
Melissa Coughey, How to Speak Chicken
Theodore Xenophon Barber, The Human Nature of Birds
Gail Damerow, Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens
Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book
Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles
Joseph Barber, The Chicken: A Natural History
Clea Danaan, The Way of the Hen: Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens
Seaweed? Skyscrapers? Methane Vaccines? How About Eating Less Meat?
Our food system needs to be sustainable for all—people, animals, and our planet.
Animal agriculture accounts for at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, over quadruple the amount from global aviation. Global meat and dairy production have increased almost fivefold since the 1960s with the advent of industrialized agriculture. These factory-like systems are characterized by cramming thousands of animals into buildings or feedlots and feeding them unnatural grain diets from crops grown offsite. Even if all fossil fuel use was halted immediately, we would still exceed 1.5°C temperature rise without changing our food system, particularly our production and consumption of animal-sourced foods.
But climate change is just one of the threats we face. We have also breached five other planetary boundaries—biodiversity; land-use change; phosphorus and nitrogen cycling; freshwater use; and pollution from man-made substances such as plastics, antibiotics, and pesticides—all of which are also driven mainly by animal-sourced food production.
The 2023 update is shown to the Planetary boundaries. (Graphic: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023/ CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
By the time world leaders were ready to consider our food system's impact on climate and the environment, the industrialized meat and dairy sector had already prepared its playbook to maintain the status quo. The Conference of Parties is meant to bring together the world's nations and thought leaders to address climate change. However, the event has become increasingly infiltrated by corporate interests. There were 52 delegates from the meat and dairy sector at COP29, many with country badges that gave them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations.
In this forum and others, the industry has peddled bombastic "solutions" under the guise of technology and innovation. Corporate-backed university research has lauded adding seaweed to cattle feed and turning manure lagoons the size of football fields into energy sources to reduce methane production. In Asia, companies are putting pigs in buildings over 20 stories tall, claiming the skyscrapers cut down on space and disease risks. And more recently, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos started bankrolling research and development into vaccines that reduce the methane-causing bacteria found naturally in cows' stomachs. The industry hopes that the novelty and allure of new technologies will woo lawmakers and investors, but these "solutions" create more problems than they solve, exacerbating net greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, wildlife loss, and freshwater depletion.
Emissions from animal-sourced foods can be broadly divided into four categories: ruminant fermentation (cow burps); manure; logistics (transport, packaging, processing, etc.); and land-use change, i.e., the conversion of wild spaces into pasture, feedlots, and cropland for feed. In the U.S., ruminant fermentation and manure emit more methane than natural gas and petroleum systems combined.
A new report found that beef consumption must decline by over a quarter globally by 2035 to curb methane emissions from cattle, which the industry's solutions claim to solve without needing to reduce consumption. But the direct emissions from cattle aren't the only problem—beef and dairy production is also the leading driver of deforestation, which must decline by 72% by 2035, and reforestation must rise by 115%. About 35% of habitable land is used to raise animals for food or to grow their feed (mostly corn and soy), about the size of North and South America combined.
Thousands of cattle mill about or huddle under shade structures at a large cattle ranch where they spend the last few months of their lives before going to slaughter in Coalinga, California, USA, 2022. (Photo: Vince Penn / We Animals)
Put simply, the inadequate solutions put forth by Big Ag cannot outpace industrialized farming's negative impacts on the planet. While seaweed and methane vaccines may address cow burps, they don't address carbon emissions from deforestation or manure emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas over 270 times more powerful than CO2. They also don't address the nitrate water pollution from manure, which can sicken people and cause massive fish kills and harmful algal blooms; biodiversity decline from habitat loss, which has dropped 73% since the rise of industrialized animal agriculture; freshwater use, drying up rivers and accounting for over a quarter of humanity's water footprint; or pesticide use on corn and soy feed, which kills soil microorganisms that are vital to life on Earth.
Skyscrapers, while solving some land-use change, do not consider the resources and the land used to grow animal feed, which is globally about equivalent to the size of Europe. They also don't address the inherent inefficiencies with feeding grain to animals raised for food. If fed directly to people, those grains could feed almost half the world's population. And while the companies using pig skyscrapers claim they enhance biosecurity by keeping potential viruses locked inside, a system failure could spell disaster, posing a bigger threat to wildlife and even humans.
We need both a monumental shift from industrialized agriculture to regenerative systems and a dramatic shift from animal-heavy diets to diets rich in legumes, beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, with meat and dairy as a specialty rather than a staple.
One solution that is gaining traction as an alternative to Big Ag's proposals is regenerative grazing. When done right, regenerative grazing eliminates the need for pesticides and leans into the natural local ecology, putting farm animals onto rotated pastures and facilitating carbon uptake into the soil. Regenerative animal agriculture is arguably the only solution put forward that addresses all six breached planetary boundaries as well as animal welfare and disease risk, and studies suggest it can improve the nutritional quality of animal-sourced foods. While it is imperative to transition from industrialized to regenerative systems, regenerative grazing comes with major caveats. This type of farming is only beneficial in small doses—cutting down centuries-old forests or filling in carbon-rich wetlands to make way for regenerative pastures would do much more climate and ecological harm than good. Soil carbon sequestration takes time and increases with vegetation and undisturbed soil, meaning that any regenerative pastures made today will never be able to capture as much carbon as the original natural landscape, especially in forests, mangroves, wetlands, and tundra. And while regenerative farmlands create better wildlife habitats than feedlots and monocultures, they still don't function like a fully natural ecosystem and food web. Also, cattle emit more methane than their native ruminant counterparts such as bison and deer.
Most notably, however, we simply don't have enough land to produce regeneratively raised animal products at the current consumption rate. Regenerative grazing requires more land than industrialized systems, sometimes two to three times more, and as mentioned the livestock industry already occupies over one-third of the world's habitable land. In all, we have much more to gain from rewilding crop- and rangeland than from turning the world into one big regenerative pasture.
A horned Pineywoods bull watches a white and black spotted Kune Kune pig at a regenerative farm in North Carolina, USA. (Photo: Mike Hansen / Getty Images)
All this brings us to one conclusion—the one that was made by scientists over a decade ago: We need to eat less meat. As Action Aid's Teresa Anderson noted at this year's COP, "The real answers to the climate crisis aren’t being heard over the corporate cacophony."
Scientific climate analyses over the last few years have been grim at best, and apocalyptic at worst. According to one of the latest U.N. reports, limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 57% by 2035, relative to 2023 emissions. However, current national policies—none of which currently include diet shifts—will achieve less than a 1% reduction by 2035. If the 54 wealthiest nations adopted sustainable healthy diets with modest amounts of animal products, they could slash their total emissions by 61%. If we also allowed the leftover land to rewild, we could sequester 30% of our global carbon budget in these nations and nearly 100% if adopted globally.
Our food system needs to be sustainable for all—people, animals, and our planet. Quick fixes and bandages will not save our planet from climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. We need both a monumental shift from industrialized agriculture to regenerative systems and a dramatic shift from animal-heavy diets to diets rich in legumes, beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, with meat and dairy as a specialty rather than a staple. As nations draft their policies for COP30, due early this year, we need leaders to adopt real food system solutions instead of buying into the corporate cacophony.
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